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But how can the unextended reach over the defined extension
of the corporeal? How can it, so, maintain itself as a unity, an
identity?
This is a problem often raised and reason calls vehemently for a
solution of the difficulties involved. The fact stands abundantly
evident, but there is still the need of intellectual
satisfaction.
We have, of course, no slight aid to conviction, indeed the very
strongest, in the exposition of the character of that principle.
It is not like a stone, some vast block lying where it lies,
covering the space of its own extension, held within its own
limits, having a fixed quantity of mass and of assigned
stone-power. It is a First Principle, measureless, not bounded
within determined size- such measurement belongs to another
order- and therefore it is all-power, nowhere under limit. Being
so, it is outside of Time.
Time in its ceaseless onward sliding produces parted interval;
Eternity stands in identity, pre-eminent, vaster by unending
power than Time with all the vastness of its seeming progress;
Time is like a radial line running out apparently to infinity but
dependent upon that, its centre, which is the pivot of all its
movement; as it goes it tells of that centre, but the centre
itself is the unmoving principle of all the movement.
Time stands, thus, in analogy with the principle which holds fast
in unchanging identity of essence: but that principle is infinite
not only in duration but also in power: this infinity of power
must also have its counterpart, a principle springing from that
infinite power and dependent upon it; this counterpart will,
after its own mode, run a course- corresponding to the course of
Time- in keeping with that stationary power which is its greater
as being its source: and in this too the source is present
throughout the full extension of its lower correspondent.
This secondary of Power, participating as far as it may in that
higher, must be identified.
Now the higher power is present integrally but, in the weakness
of the recipient material, is not discerned as every point; it is
present as an identity everywhere not in the mode of the material
triangle- identical though, in many representations, numerically
multiple, but in the mode of the immaterial, ideal triangle which
is the source of the material figures. If we are asked why the
omnipresence of the immaterial triangle does not entail that of
the material figure, we answer that not all Matter enters into
the participation necessary; Matter accepts various forms and not
all Matter is apt for all form; the First Matter, for example,
does not lend itself to all but is for the First Kinds first and
for the others in due order, though these, too, are omnipresent.
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